The following interview with Cambridge academic Ian Patterson was conducted in the Autumn of 2008 by Ben Pritchett and Decca Muldowney for the second issue of the radical magazine Impropaganda which, in the event, never appeared. We publish it here because it might be of interest to student activists interested in the parallels, or lack of parallels, between campus politics now and how it was in the late 60s/early 70s. It is considerably longer than most posts on the blog, but is published as an interesting in-depth personal reflection on student politics.
Decca Muldowney: Our theme is student activism then and now. When did you come to Cambridge?
Ian Patterson: I was here from ’66 to ’69, and I stayed till ’71. So I was around for five years. Nothing much happened in Cambridge in ’68, mostly what happened here was a little bit later – in ’69, and in the early ‘70s.
DM: In hindsight we can look at ’68 and see what was happening in Prague, in Mexico, in France, in Britain, in America, and all over the world. Were you aware of those things at the time? Did it seem like it was joined up internationally?
IP: Globalisation has happened since then, and that’s a big difference from when we were here. The sheer volume of information that we know now – we simply didn’t have the same rapidity of information, the same sense of what was going on in different parts of the world that we automatically get now, even though there were many more foreign correspondents then than there are now. There were only three channels on the television.
In 1968 itself, although me and my friends were vaguely aware of what was going on in Paris, and although I knew one or two people who’d gone there, it wasn’t on the top of our agenda.
Jon Chadwick, who is a theatre director still, wrote and directed a play which he took to Edinburgh in the summer of ’69, about Jan Palach and Prague, which I reviewed for Varsity. He was one of the agit-prop type experimental playwrights. And that was quite good, that indicates that we were thinking at least about the Prague Spring and the aftermath of the repression again there. I don’t think anybody was much aware of what was going on in Mexico – or in Italy either, because that’s a bit later. We had a certain distaste for the rather militarised demonstrating style of the Germans, with their helmets and staves…
Rudi Dutschke was meant to come to Cambridge, in the Autumn of ’69, and Reginald Maudling, the home secretary, refused to give him a visa. I remember Jeremy Prynne writing a letter and trying to get a campaign to allow him to come, but that didn’t come to anything. So I don’t know how much one thought of oneself as part of anything that you could call a movement, but certainly thought of lots of like-minded people in different parts of the world.
You have to remember, that at the same time, as usual, lots of silliness was going on, because it was Cambridge, and the silliness was getting as much press as anything else. So we did feel ourselves to be a minority interest – not a majority at all. I can hardly think of anybody else in Pembroke who had the slightest interest in these things. The friends I had in Pembroke, were mostly uninterested or apolitical, and I think that’s probably true of 90% of the people, at least, at university then.
DM: I’m glad that you’re saying that because people paint it as a time when everyone was involved and it was just incredible, and no-one ever felt as though they were struggling against a mass, a wave of apathy.
IP: I don’t know very much about the hard left and the Communist party left in Cambridge in that period, I don’t know what they were doing. I have an idea that the Communist party was probably selling the Morning Star outside the PYE factory, and International Socialists (IS) was moving towards student politics more and setting up their Vietnam solidarity campaign. Student politics in Cambridge tended to be dominated by IS in those days, which was what became the SWP, so there was quite a lot of getting up early and going out to factory gates, and perhaps a distaste for involvement with students in 1967-68.
I knew one or two people who were involved in that sort of thing and it always seemed to me to be a strange choice and not one that I understood. I hadn’t read Marx then, it was not until ’68-’69 that I began to get involved in that sort of thing. So, it made an impact, but not a very direct one.
I wasn’t aware of any of that myself, I was much more, well, (a) I was much more Situationist/anarchistical, and (b) I was approaching it all via poetry. It was a period of intellectual ferment for me, as I guess people’s second and third years at Cambridge quite often are, but it all seemed to tie in much better with the world than it often has at other times.
I was involved mostly in poetry and English faculty stuff. There was dissent in the English faculty, and everywhere else at that time, and there were a series of open meetings in the faculty of lecturers and students. At the end of ’68, probably, I jumped up and ran down to the front because I suddenly had this epiphanic realisation that there was nobody with a gun making you take exams. I said, ‘you realise, we don’t have to take exams? If anybody’s interested in not taking exams, can they stay behind and see me afterwards’. A little nucleus of people stayed behind and we set up this group. We used to meet quite regularly. The group was called X17, because it met in room X17 in King’s, the rooms of somebody called Steve Vahrman. (He did a column in King’s Parade, a year or two ago, in which he recalled that time.) We wanted to abolish exams. There were always interesting people hanging around, and people visited from Essex and LSE, and we got together huge quantities of material about assessment all over English faculties in America and England, and we presented all this stuff to the faculty… and nothing much happened but we were allowed to take books into the Tragedy paper. That’s all. But there was a committee set up, of course. And then there was a sub-committee of that committee to look at exams.
Raymond Williams said to me and my friend Nick Totton as we were walking along King’s Parade after the first meeting, ‘I wouldn’t expect much to happen from this meeting, the university has been quite adept at fighting off change for 800 years, I don’t think you’re going to make a big impact on it now’. Which was true.
By the summer, by the time that the LSE events had been happening, and there’d been a certain amount of interchange, various groups were set up so that in Cambridge then there was a small group of the Radical Socialist Students Federation (RSSF), and there were a few people who thought of themselves as Situationists.There was a group of people in ’68-’69 which split off from the X17 group called the ‘Academic Cripples’, and there was a march which was quite well attended through the centre of town with a banner saying ‘Academic Cripples – Abolish Exams’.
There was certainly quite a lot to complain about and the syllabuses were, certainly in the humanities, academic and unable to cope, both in their teaching methods, and in their subject matter, with things that we wanted to know more about. In the English faculty, for example, we weren’t allowed to study Marx or Freud, which we obviously wanted to do. That changed quite rapidly in the aftermath of ’68. There was a ‘free’ university set up (it wasn’t really a free university or an alternative university) which put on certain events – I remember going to hear a talk on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right by Ben Brewster, which we thought was tremendously exciting. The place was absolutely crowded with people listening to this – it was actually rather dry, academic stuff, but it was the sort of thing that we’d never come into contact with before. In the ’68-’69 year, the English society or club ran a series of alternative seminars on Marx and on Freud. The Freud seminar, a sort of reading group, was led by a graduate student from Columbia. We read through the New Introductory Lectures and it was genuinely inspiring and educational.
In the end of ’68 there was a sit-in at the Senate House. I wasn’t there – I was ill. I can’t remember now what the main issues were, but perhaps there was something to do with the restrictive regulations we lived under, and with the admission of women? There wasn’t very much personal freedom. It was still the days when colleges were locked at 10 or 11, and there were a lot of petty restrictions, and people could be sent down for having people to stay in their rooms at night and so on, rather strange to think of, but… When people were forced out after two days, on Senate House lawn there were all lines of hunting and rowing people from Magdalen and Trinity, with whips, baying for blood. Coming out of the Senate House the people were hit and swung at by this gauntlet of aristos and hunters and unpleasant people in tweeds, and people who wanted to be like that. So there was a certain amount of violence, mostly from the right, though I don’t think that that meant there was a huge polarisation in the university between left and right.
The other important feature of student politics from that time was The Shilling Paper, the alternative to Varsity. It was the left-wing newspaper that was deliberately set up to be based in the town not in the university. It covered town and university issues impartially. It was printed by what was then the new printing process, offset litho, so it didn’t have to use all the old fashioned newspaper print technology which Varsity used. Some of the people who were involved in starting that were around IS, but there were anarchists and there were Situationist-type people, and a lot of good unaligned lefties. The Shilling Paper covered strikes, and any kind of political unrest and tried to explain the university to the town, the town to the university. It was jolly good – a bit expensive actually – a shilling was as much as you would want to pay for a paper, so there was a slight element of good will in buying it. But it was an institution for some years. There may be copies in the Cambridge collection in the university library.
Later on there was the Garden House affair. That’s 1970 I think. The Greek Junta was in power, and the Garden House Hotel in collaboration with a local travel agent, was promoting Greece as a holiday destination, and the Greek embassy was collaborating with them. Because nothing else much was going on, and because this was a way of demonstrating against the Junta, there was a big demonstration, and it got violent. I think it was provoked, to some extent, by the police. Nothing very much in the way of damage happened on this occasion, I think mostly it was broken glass. When you look back on it, it was a time of extraordinary repression, when they came to court. The people who were arrested came up against Lord Justice Melford Stevenson, who was also the judge in the Angry Brigade trial, and who was incredibly right wing – he lived in a house called ‘Truncheons’… For students to get up to 18 months in prison was really quite extraordinary. The arrests were pretty indiscriminate. Lord Eatwell, the current President of Queens’, was originally arrested, and then released for lack of evidence; he was described by the judge as ‘an evil influence’.
But back to the late sixties. There was some quite wild and liberational drama going on. Bruce Birchall at Peterhouse, with his mass of flowing curly hair, did a great version of The Bacchae in Peterhouse gardens, experimental, avant-garde and political, with audience involvement and (I think) music, maybe from Henry Cow, with Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson. The other student newspaper thing was called Broadsheet, a listings mag started by a guy called Mike Sparrow (who went on to work for BBC London). It came out as a single or double sheet, and it listed everything that was on that week. It was a wonderful thing, it was the first time there’d ever been one, I think it even predated, or certainly was at the same time as Time Out. And that became quite important for people, it brought people together, allowed people to advertise events. These were pre-mobile phone days of course, pre-phone – nobody had a phone in their room, so if you wanted to telephone somebody up, you couldn’t – you could ring people from a phonebox, that was about it. If you wanted to get in touch with somebody, either you went round to their room, or you sent them a letter. And dropped a note off in their pigeon-hole, that was the only way of doing it. Or you hoped to see them. So, meeting people at places like Sidgwick, or King’s Bar, was much more important – most colleges didn’t have bars in those days, certainly my college, Pembroke, didn’t have a bar.
I think it was much easier also – although this may just have been a sign of our shallowness – to recognise sympathetic people by what they looked like. People were certainly defined much more by their exteriors, by the kind of clothes they wore and how long their hair was. By whether they had beards or not. If you went into a space and there was a group of people with hair on their shoulders, and floppy bell-bottomed trousers, and tie-dyed t-shirts, then you made a bee-line for them, rather than the people in tweed jackets and grey flannels. It hadn’t reached a point where fashion had taken over identity, so there was still an element of protest in the way you dressed. But there was also of course a lot of dressing up in the usual sort of way, so sometimes I looked like the sort of person that I would make a bee-line for, other times I was wearing a three-piece demob suit and fair isle jersey. When I was pretending to be a ‘30s poet. Also, I mostly wore bare feet, which was another thing that people did.
DM: That’s still the height of protest in King’s, people not wearing shoes. People have not moved on greatly.
IP: It’s a strange kind of protest, an uncomfortable one too…
As far as I was concerned, and as far as a lot of people were concerned, there wasn’t much of a distinction between the artistic avant-garde and the political avant-garde; they were much closer. So from my point of view, as poet, my involvement in this was first of all discovering the whole hinterland of social anthropology, Marxism, psychoanalysis and realising that this fantastic literature of thinking about the stuff I wanted to think about had been going on for a hundred years without my knowing about it. This was most excitingly being dealt with by the experimental writers that I was just discovering, partly people like Ed Dorn and Charles Olson, J.H. Prynne, partly writers like Brecht, and Michael McClure and Allen Ginsberg and Pete Brown. So there were two kinds of things which were meeting also in music, which also linked in with soft drugs. But too much dope tended to lead to people lying around, and too little tended to people being too straight, so there was a balance to be struck.
The first consciously ‘alternative’ poetry readings in Cambridge, took place in King’s cellar, where it had just been opened as the cellar bar in 1967-’68 probably or autumn of ’69, with Nick Totton I think, or maybe David Shapiro, and me. The other influence on us was from America, particularly with affiliated students and post-graduate students, some of whom were draft dodging, by being post-graduate students. And there were two ways in which they were influential: one, there was a group of American post-graduate students who ran an LSD making lab in their house, which was quite important for some people – though not for me – but the acid culture came through that, but also there were people who’d been involved in SDS, Students for a Democratic Society…
The Americans, most of them postgraduate students so a bit older, had experience of what was going on in the States, and particularly in the West coast, in Berkeley, and so on, and also people from Columbia who’d been working in poetry with Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery, and were introducing us to all that kind of stuff. So a whole new kind of poetry was coming in, at the same time of course as rock music was the accompaniment to all this, because all the great rock music was happening at that time.
Ben Pritchett: How might somebody take the experience of that period and translate it into something that might be helpful for us today?
IP: One of the things I think that’s important is linking things together, linking different aspects of one’s life up. Something that was really attractive to me about reading Marcuse, who was a very influential figure on my thinking then, particularly reading Eros and Civilization, was the idea that having fun was part of revolution. A social order that didn’t allow varieties of sexual pleasure, and varieties of entertaining intellectual experience, theatre and painting, as important parts of how you made sense of life, was not a social order to be supported.
Of course, part of the sexual energy that fuelled the stuff in universities, particularly universities like Cambridge, was to do with the fact that there was a ratio of ten to one between men and women. So the idea that it might be better must have been a factor, though we weren’t actively, on the whole, campaigning for that in Cambridge at the time – it wasn’t at the top of our list. Although there were lots of enjoyable things to do, and one had lots of nice relationships, the idea that it could be represented by the sort of thing that you get from a picture of a rock festival – all these images that you get of the ‘summer of love’ – is quite wrong. There simply were, in the streets and everywhere else, or at lectures, overwhelmingly, men, and in colleges, overwhelmingly men. Girls walked through, or walked in, or were guests, or were visitors, and then disappeared again. So there’s an element of fantasy in most people’s recollection of Cambridge.
But to get back to your question, I think we were motivated by the idea that something desperately bad had happened as a consequence of capitalism and the division of labour, and we’d lost touch with all sorts of potential, how life ought to be, and were living in a grey, half useless world, leaving half of us unstimulated, unused, and unexplored. The sense of discovery was partly from discovering that there was more to you yourself than you had thought there was, and there could be more to everybody.
BP: People might argue that one difference today is that this pleasure principle has been co-opted into capitalism – which makes it more difficult to have desire driving your protest…
IP: Absolutely. I still think it’s important to do it, and to try and reclaim it from the advertisers and the merchandisers, and to say that the sheerest form of happiness is not a new six hundred pound bag. The Situationists have got all this sussed in the fifties really, I think that Debord and Vaneigem are much the most interesting of the theorists to come out of that period, and reading Marcuse now, he looks rather clunky, in lots of ways.
BP: You translated Raoul Vaneigem?
IP: Yes – but that was much later on, in the ’80s, or even the ’90s, when that came out, and that’s sort of academic work… But I did do, just for local consumption, some Situationist translation at the time, and some Lacan. That was mainly for my own interest, and to share around with some other people. I don’t think any of that ever saw the light of day anywhere. I still think it’s worth insisting on thinking about the various vectors and trajectories of desire, as Lacan does – Lacan’s no revolutionary, but there are things that can be thought through his thought.
BP: Deleuze and Guattari take up Lacan too…
IP: Particularly Deleuze, yes. But we were reading all this stuff at a time when it was stringently outside the academic framework – we couldn’t write essays on it, we couldn’t go to lectures on it, none of the books was in the libraries, this was an alternative thing. It didn’t last like that, by ’70 or so, people were staying on doing PhDs, and all the people who are now the professors around the land, started using this stuff. But just for the year or two, when Nick Totton and I were editing our poetry magazine, it seemed that universities were not the place to be. Which was one of the reasons why it took me 22 years to come back and do a PhD, because we thought it was quite important that what we were hanging on to should be outside the university structure, and we wanted to try and make intellectual careers outside the co-optive structure of the university.
In the wake of May ’68 there was a new interest in French structuralism, and this is one of the things that was the most intellectually energising and divisive, which became political in Cambridge from sort of ’69-’70 until the end of the MacCabe affair in the late ‘70s. In fact until the rejection of the move to give Derrida an honorary degree. I wasn’t in Cambridge then, so I can only tell you at second hand. But Colin MacCabe was a junior lecturer in the English Faculty, and he was, along with Stephen Heath and Chris Prendergast, responsible for enthusiastic propagation of structuralist ideas; they published a very interesting selection of texts under the title of Signs of the Times, which must have inspired a lot of people.
DM: Do you think the student body is more apathetic than it used to be? If so, is that because the world’s changed, or because students have changed?
IP: Probably demonstrations are smaller when there are demonstrations, and there isn’t the same interest in mass political movements as there has been at certain points. The stop the war moment didn’t get as much support in Cambridge as it did nationally. Things go up and down; the Vietnam war was the focus in the late 60s, and the CND and END were the focus in the mid, early eighties, National Abortion Campaign in the mid-to-late seventies.
BP: Why do you think the CND campaign isn’t so popular anymore, even though there are plans to replace Trident?
IP: There’s an interesting article in the latest issue of New Left Review by Susan Watkins about this, calling for some new updated CND campaigns. I’m very sympathetic to this, CND is where my political engagement began when I was a schoolboy, CND and anti-apartheid, and those were the things that I did in the ‘60s before I came to Cambridge, and didn’t do much of while I was at Cambridge, and then did again in the ’70s, and ’80s. I think that CND is very important, now, I think it’s crucial.
I think partly that there’s a very strong sense that America is so powerful that there is no alternative and how do you set about demanding that America reduce its nuclear arsenal? It’s not a question of the world being about to implode and destroy itself in a conflict between superpowers, at least not at the moment, but who knows what might happen in the future.
Students have far more work to do now than they had in the sixties. I certainly didn’t feel stressed about the amount of time I had for reading. Though to tell you the truth, I didn’t go to any supervisions for my last year and a bit, so I was free to choose how to spend my time. But as far as I can remember, when I was working for Part I, I had plenty of free time. I only had to write one essay a week and I could usually do it in a day or two. I don’t think the conditions are comparable.
The other key thing to remember is that we benefited from free education. Everybody had their fees paid, and there were (means-tested) maintenance grants. We had grants. Nobody I knew really worried about jobs, either; some people who were passionate about a certain career, but mostly assumed they would be able to get into it without too much difficulty. Quite a high proportion of English students still went into teaching, people went into social work, there were a lot of people who were committed to being altruistic members of society. And the growing importance of ‘the alternative’ , of alternative and utopian ways of living, changed the way many of us thought about the future. I didn’t know many people who became bankers or lawyers, though of course some people did.
DM: Whereas now English graduates are targeted by investment banks, and law firms and things. From the day you arrive, you know you’re going to come out twenty thousand pounds in debt. It’s a taxation on the fact that you’ll get a better job – the point is, that means you’re not going to work in the voluntary or public sector or as a teacher.
IP: Because you can’t. And it’s hard enough if you’re going to work in publishing or something because you’ve got to do a year or two as an intern without pay.
DM: It just perpetuates people from Oxford and Cambridge going into very similar types of jobs.
IP: There’s been a huge increase in materialism. That is undeniable. In unthinking materialism – the idea that materialism is the only way of thinking. The idea that the government justifies university education because it improves your earning prospects would have been unthinkable, laughable in the sixties. Or the fifties, I think. And in the early sixties, there were more students in Cambridge from working class homes than there are now, because of the scholarship system. If you did get a scholarship then you were completely paid for. You might not be as rich as some people, but you came out with no financial worries. That was really important. And the loss of that is phenomenally important. The fact that the demonstration against top-up fees last week, or the week before, attracted about a hundred people from four universities seems to me a commentary on the difficulty of getting back to the – you can’t get back to that stage – but getting through the sense that this is not a necessary way of doing it. It’s almost impossible for people to think that it’s not a sensible thing to do to charge fees.
DM: I don’t know whether it’s really short memory on the part of students because the turnover of students is so high. If you have to pay, you just think that this is something I have to pay for – not a public good, not a public service, unlike primary and secondary education.
IP: It’s partly because of expansion of tertiary education since the sixties, which is partly one of the consequences of the sixties. There were 10% of the number of people in higher education then, than there are now. An extra factor of nine extra, makes it that much more expensive – plus everything else is more expensive. Plus the whole notion of ‘expensive’ is different, because accountancy has changed completely. Everything has to be accounted for now, has to have a notional cost. So the whole business of what things cost is a different conceptual area.
BP: Do you think the financial crisis at the moment is going to have an effect on how this plays out?
IP: I was surprised in a way, that there doesn’t seem to have been a very widespread resurgence of Marxist thinking, nobody much seems to suggest that there might be an alternative to capitalism.
DM: Although the word ‘capitalism’ has come back into public discourse, and the word ‘socialism’. At the moment the word ‘socialism’ is being defined by people who are not socialists, like the Republicans who are calling Obama socialist –
IP: Or Bush socialist for –
DM: – or Bush socialist, which I never thought I’d live to see. The danger is that the word gets defined by people who are in no way invested in having it defined as what it is. As long as I’ve been alive, I’ve only ever read a criticism of capitalism in a book, I’ve never seen it on the television. But I think it’s really good that the words are back.
IP: Yes it good. The Historical Materialism conference, which I didn’t go to, at the beginning of November, in London, I’ve been told had a lot of very good analyses. But it’s all very well having a fine critical analysis of something, if nobody takes any notice of it, or if nobody can do anything with it. All that happens is that the truth of it gets taken out and used to advantage by those who can. And things go on the same.
DM: These things come and go. In a time, like now, so many people think that the situation that we are in will never change, and that we have come to the end of history and the pinnacle of civilization, and that it cannot get any better or worse… but in ten years or five years… I think in ’67 or at the beginning of ’68, De Gaulle made a speech where he said ‘I look at the next year with hope of stability and security’ and he was almost completely toppled within the next year. So things change really fast, and I guess we’ve just got to be ready.
IP: After I left Cambridge, and got a job teaching in a further education college in London, I got involved in much more conventional politics and trade union politics, and I joined the International Socialists, and I founded and edited Tech Teacher, the Rank and File paper in the A.T.T.I (further education and higher education trade union), and I did that sort of thing quite intensively for some time… Until I ran out of – well until it ran out of enthusiasm for me, actually, I was expelled from IS – but I was being oppositional, and getting fed up with economism, and the lack of general openness and spark and variety, zaniness.
DM: Had it become the SWP by then?
IP: No, but it was just beginning to think about it and I thought this was foolish and deluded.
DM: A lot of what you’ve just said about IS, people are still saying about the SWP…
IP: Once you get that kind of thing, something that hands down a line, and that claims to run from democratic centralism, it thinks it has the answer, and becomes inflexible and authoritarian.
